During an incident in a specific jurisdiction, incoming emergency calls related to the incident are routed to a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system associated with the jurisdiction where the incident occurred. The CAD associated with the jurisdiction where the incident occurred may assign resources from that jurisdiction, that is, local resources or responders of a local agency, for example, emergency personnel such as firefighters and/or police and/or emergency equipment such as trucks or ambulances, to respond to the incident. However, in some instances, the local resources may be insufficient for responding to the incident and the CAD further may request assistance from resources of other jurisdictions that are needed for responding to the incident. Such resources of other jurisdictions are also known as “mutual aid” resources or responders.
In some instances, there may be no public safety wide area network (WAN) wireless coverage at the incident scene. In such an instance, an Incident Area Network (IAN) may be set up to enable wireless communications among the local responders and to enable the local responders to access local services provided by servers of the local agency or by an emergency response Command VAN of the local agency present at the incident scene. For example, the IAN may be a mesh network that is established utilizing broadband handheld devices and broadband vehicular devices of the local responders. When mutual aid responders arrive at the incident scene, they also may need to join the IAN and access the local services provided by the local agency.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. Those skilled in the art will further recognize that references to specific implementation embodiments such as “circuitry” may equally be accomplished via replacement with software instruction executions either on general purpose computing apparatus (e.g., CPU) or specialized processing apparatus (e.g., DSP). It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.